Dallas was the birthplace of Neiman Marcus. Henry Marcus left Sangar Brothers, an even older department store. Sangar later merged with A. Harris, which also was founded in the 19th century. And that’s just Dallas. San Antonio had Joske’s; Foley’s was headquartered in Houston. Every one of those stores lasted into the 1980s, and of course Neiman’s is still hanging on.
Every area had local department stores. Even in Connecticut, we had Edward Malley in New Haven and G Fox in Hartford. New Haven also had Macy’s store starting in 1964. My mother remembers it as an elegant store when they moved to the area in the late 1960s and the 1970s.
Depends how you define “largest”, I guess? Tibby told us a few posts back about the multiple major department stores of midcentury Philadelphia. Boston had Jordan Marsh and Filene’s, and probably many others I don’t know about. Providence (RI) had Shepard’s and Gladding’s and Cherry & Webb. New Haven (CT) had Gamble-Desmond and Edward Malley. [ETA: ninja’d by Dewey_Finn!]
Sure, the absolute grandest stores were showpieces of the major metropolises. But most cities of moderate size had one or more department stores that would be considered pretty “grand” by modern retail standards, with a piano player and a refreshments location and a perfume counter and so forth.
I probably have the same book about Horn & Hardart as you.
H&H opened their first restaurant in Philadelphia (my stomping ground), on December 22, 1888. I was too young to remember which H&H in Philly I ate at (they had a few), but I remember loving it, even though it was well past its prime. My grandparents and parents ate at the automat often in H&H’s heyday, and they spoke of it lovingly. If I could bring back one eating establishment from the past, it would surely be Horn & Hardart. It was iconic.
My wife is from the outskirts of Philadelphia, and we both have fond memories of H&H. Her mother bought at their outlet store. There was a small one next to the movie theater in my neighborhood I took dates to, but it was more regular service, not an Automat. They did have the cool coffee dispensers, but I didn’t drink coffee back then.
Ah, H&H mac and cheese. Ah, the woman dispensing nickels. Great memories.
Not to mention immortalized in the classic Concerto for Horn and Hardart (S.27) by PDQ Bach.
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Jasper Mall (2020) is a solid documentary relevant to this thread’s topic. I saw it on a plane to kill some time and was glad I did. It was so much more interesting than a documentary about a dying mall should be.
I think this guy is dead on as well.
I read this thread with interest, because the descriptions of department stores is utterly alien to me. I grew up in rural Ohio. We didn’t have department stores or malls. We did have a strip of shops on Main St in downtown. And we had the Sears catalog.
Columbus, Ohio is nowhere near the biggest city now and was even smaller at the time, but even it had a big multi-story department store with a formal restaurant and escalators and its own choir and such. I doubt it was exactly Macy’s on Herald Square (though through a serious of mergers and acquisitions, the company now owns Macy’s) but it was still the kind of big fancy store that no longer really exists around here.
I don’t remember piano players but I do fondly remember department stores’ custom restaurants. Although it seems like every retailer had their own branded refreshment stand/restaurant. Traditional department stores were better than the rest, though. Whereas K-Mart’s own restaurants were amongst the worst restaurants I’ve eaten in, and Woolworth’s were just average. K-Mart was so bad that their switch to Little Caesar’s was a massive improvement.
Target and Wal*mart do sometimes have other brands restaurants in their locations but it’s pretty variable. Target often only has a Starbucks which doesn’t have very filling fare.
Houston had the Sakowitz Department Store, which offered a ritzy shopping experience until it closed in 1990.
Galveston’s retail giants apparently were of lesser stature but still impressive.
In Canada, we used to have Sears (Simpsons Sears if you go back as far as I do), Eaton’s and The Bay (aka The Hudson’s Bay Company). The Bay is still around but shuttering stores all over. Eaton’s has been gone for a while, leaving the Eaton Centre in downtown Toronto without its namesake. And Sears vanished a while back but I don’t remember when. I’ve seen a lot of H&M shops pop up to fill the gap, and quite a few Uniqlo, which all sell stylish-ish clothes and not-horrible prices.
Down a step (or a dozen) in quality we had ubiquitous K-Marts, Zellers (owned by the HBC), and really scraping the bottom of the barrel, BiWay. Target tried expanding into Canada about a decade ago, and it was a quite noticeable catastophe.
My family used to hit the American department stores when we’d cross the border on vacation…usually J.C. Penny’s, maybe Montgomery Ward but I don’t remember them much. It was always kind of exciting, being in a huge store that was kinda like ours but nobody spoke French (bilingual signage resulted in many people I knew referring to “The Bay” as “La Baie”) and maybe they had a better toy aisle. I barely buy clothes these days (bachelor life, I buy one shirt when an old one gets ragged), so if I need jeans, I’ll maybe go to Levi’s if there’s a sale but otherwise the Wal-Mart ten minutes away is fine for my function-over-form needs.
I can’t imagine why any sort of eatery is needed when you have a whole mall/shopping center to choose from. At least Walmart offers a floor show.
Hey, you grew up in my area! I remember that duck pond Moorestown Mall used to have, and the birdcage in Cherry Hill Mall.
Not a piano, but you can listen to live organ music played twice daily at Macy’s Center City (formally John Wanamaker) at 13th & Market St., Philadelphia.
It’s a bit grander than the Muzak piped into Walmart, or Target.
*Note the iconic “Meet me at the Eagle” statue (also at the suburban Cherry Hill Mall store).
Nope, Springfield.
It was “up and coming” when we moved to the area 30+ years ago - they were just planning (and then building) a huge extension that accommodated Macy’s, among other places. Then the long, slow decline and remodeling, and the much-touted reopening in which most promises the developers made went unfulfilled. Still a useful place to shop.
As opposed to Landmark Mall, which had been an open-air mall before we moved here, and is now literally GONE (anyone who knows northern Virginia may be familiar with what a nightmare it was to get there by car). Before it was demolished, however, apparently a scene near the beginning of the newer Wonder Woman movie was filmed there.
I fondly remember Harrisburg East Mall - the anchors were Gimbels and Wanamakers, and there was a fountain display. We kids LOVED to be dropped off there to wander around with a little spending money, just to window-shop. The mall closed in recent years and is slated for demolition.
These stores must have been from an earlier time period than the ‘80s. I don’t recall any stores with their own restaurants, live music, etc. I do remember the malls (there were two back in the day, now we only have one) in Corpus having a Sears in addition to the stores we still have like J.C. Penney and Dillard’s. I remember them being the same back in the ‘80s as they as they are now. Yes, they were larger than the other stores in the mall, but they were 2 stories, not five or six. Their focus was mostly on clothes, with smaller areas for household appliances, kitchen items, bedding and such. Sears had a section for outdoor items like lawnmowers and other yard equipment, but that was about it. The only thing that rings a bell are the perfume counters. That part is still something I see to this day.
Food courts definitely killed the department store branded eatery even though it was superior to the big box/discount branded eatery. But I see a better use case for the latter since they are often found in strip malls which means you have to go outside to get an an eatery, much of the time without so much as an awning protecting you from the elements.
I’ll cite an even smaller city: Spokane. It had several multi-story downtown department stores. The biggest, The Crescent, was seven stories. It’s main competitor, The Bon Marche, was six.
My mom grew up in Columbus OH (they moved into the city when she was seven from Murray City – try finding that on a map). One of the times we went back East to visit, one of my cousins took my sisters and I to the fancy department store downtown. I don’t remember the name, but it was fancy. This was probably in the late 60s.
None of these and almost none of the stores you mention say “department store” to me. Maybe Eaton’s and The Bay? The rest are just economy stores with only very little besides clothing.